Inspirational Quotes for Teachers

“Ideal teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross, then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

“Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.”

— Marva Collins

“The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers rather than to fill it with the accumulation of others.”

— Tyron Edwards

“Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.”

–Josef Albers

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength of the nation.”

— John F. Kennedy

“Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.”

— John Gardner

“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.”

–Kahlil Gibran

“A very wise old teacher once said: “I consider a day’s teaching wasted if we do not all have one hearty laugh.” He meant that when people laugh together, they cease to be young and old, master and pupils, jailer and prisoners. They become a single group of human beings enjoying its existence.”

— Gilbert Highet

“It is not what is poured into a student that counts but what is planted.”

— Linda Conway

“Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”

–William Butler Yeats

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, the excitement, and the mystery of the world we live in.”

–Rachel Carlson

“Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.”

— William Haley

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”